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New Culture war fodder from the UK: The Guardian (I read it for the math puzzles):
Seems like the TERFs (including JK Rowling) won this one.
The process for obtaining a GRC is detailed in the WP Article on the Gender Recognition Act 2004 . It seems that you require a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and then a panel will rule your case.
Now, I have no idea how much of a hassle this is. For all I know, it could be a rubber stamp process where any bearded 40yo can get his diagnosis and GRC with minimum hassle and then proceed to jerk off to random women in communal showers. Or it could be a long journey to get the diagnosis.
How many perverts who got their GRC just to watch naked women are there in the UK, anyhow? Is this a practical concern, do women get raped by m2f GRC holders in safe spaces, or is this a moral panic?
On the matter, I don't think there is a great "one size fits all" solution. Allowing biologically male perverts to intrude on women safe spaces just by yelling "I identify as a woman" seems bad. Forcing someone who underwent HRT and surgery and passes as female even naked to shower with the guys also seems bad. For that matter, making a passing f2m with beard, muscles and a dick shower with the women is also not helping anyone.
Also, should I don't think it is a good idea to let the government regulate which groups get safe spaces where. If a private swimming pool decides to establish unisex communal showers, let them try it. If some weirdo religious organization tells people who they think are non-straight to use individual changing rooms lest anyone is aroused, let them. If a lesbian organizations requires all their members to menstruate, let them. (Yes, this leaves public bathrooms and the like as a point of contention.)
On a more meta-level, this feels like legislation from the bench. From my understanding, the 2004 GRA updated the legal definition of "man" and "woman". The Equality Act was passed in 2010. Presumably, parliament was aware of changed definition when they passed the Equality Act. If they meant "biological woman", not "legal woman", they should have specified that. If we allow people to change their legal gender, then their gender should also be recognized in all aspects. If you are f2m and the men get drafted, you get drafted. If a judge orders a mass DNA test of all men, then the f2m gets swabbed as well. If NHS pays for a mammography for women of a certain age, then the m2f gets their fucking mammography.
Finally,
Now, I don't know this circumstances. Perhaps one in 30 board seats is reserved for women, and on half of the boards they were filled with trans-women, leading to everyone on that board having the Y chromosome. If that is the case, then I apologize for the following misinterpretation.
Quotas suck in the first place. Most people are not on some Board Of Important People, and the ones who are on them take care of their class, not their gender cohort. Sure, an all-male board of directors will fuck over working class women in the company, but they will just as eagerly fuck over men in the company. The childless career female board member will not care more for the plights of a single mother than her male colleagues. But whatever, apparently we have quotas. If you have, say eight out of 20 board appointments thanks to your quota, and then you bitch that one of them is a trans-woman when that seat is clearly the birth-right of a biological woman, that seems incredibly petty.
Quotas can be good or bad. But, if a society has already accepted the need for a quota system, trying to police who is allowed in is the least petty thing in the world.
It would be absolutely horrible for a feminist quota system if everyone could just say that men counted for their purposes and the underrepresentation problem was declared solved as a result.
Quotas can be bad or necessary, is how I would put it.
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"Half our software development team are (trans)women" isn't, IMHO, the gender equality in the workforce that feminists wanted. I don't even really consider myself one, or endorse quotas, but it doesn't scream to me proof that true parity has been reached for little girls' career prospects.
This makes me wonder if “Shakespeare’s women roles were always played by men in theatrical drag” was solely due to the oft-claimed patriarchal misogyny caused by rigid religious sensitivities about putting women on display, or if transwomen and/or crossdressing gay men convinced society to let them monopolize the parts. I’m guessing some mix.
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I would argue that "society has accepted the need for a quota system" is true in roughly the same way that "society has accepted that men can become women" is true. Both are the law of the land, but both likely do not have the same broad acceptance as say laws against arsons have.
Again, I think that the numbers matter. If half of all board positions reserved for women are filled by bearded trans-women who just changed their legal gender identity, I would totally agree with you. If trans women are represented in quota board positions in roughly the same fraction as they are represented among women in the population, I think it is incredibly petty.
There are obviously dissenters, but the pro-equality bureaucracy trans activists hijack is far more popular when used for its original purposes than for this stuff. I'm of the opinion that that general ethos/bureaucracy created the problem but most people are not willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
In countries like the US this is even more obvious than in Britain because the laws often being exploited for trans activism (Title IX) were clearly about sex and have to be turned to a new purpose by much less accountable Presidential actions compared to passing a new law.
That's why there's so much forced teaming and the constant implication that being anti-trans is in some way racist.
I have no problem with a principled attack on quotas. "Why do you care if it's only one?" is what I find meaningless.
Because:
The principle matters, especially when we're dealing with something that clearly can spread and has no strong limiting factor. People used to make these arguments in sport because no one ever saw a transwoman win. No one can guarantee it'll stay within the bounds of their proportion of the population.
People who actually dislike quotas should be the people most confident about this it seems? Presumably you think men are overrepresented in certain spaces for a reason. Letting them identify as women will just cause this overrepresentation to spill over.
On a much more basic level one wonders what the point is? Are people who were raised as men up until X year (sometimes they transition already into middle age) saddled with the same problems that prevent female advancement?
I think that the moral panic about transgenderism spreading is exaggerated. Sure, I think that telling kids "you can be whatever gender you want with no tradeoffs" is bad, but I do not expect many to transition, just as the majority of men stayed straight even as gay sex was legalized. I don't think that we will reach a world where 10% of adults opt for HRT.
While we can debate if a trans woman has a more or less difficult role to play than a cis-women until the sun implodes, I don't think it matters much as long as only a small fraction of women are trans and the quota seats are respecting that proportion.
For comparison, there are people who are born with CAIS -- XY chromosome with a body which will be assigned female at birth without chromosome analysis. Does anyone care if they can get a quota board seat? From a standpoint of principle, this would be just as valid a battlefield, but in practice, nobody gives a fuck, because they are exceedingly rare.
Now, trans-people are a lot more common than genetic disorders affecting sex, but in the grand scheme of things they are still pretty uncommon. A quota is a rough compromise in the first place, not single island of fairness in a sea of unfairness. If you lose 5% of women's seats to trans-women, and 2% of non-quota seats go to trans-men, I just don't see the great divine injustice in that.
For it to matter at scale, one of three things would have to be the case:
(1) M2F transitions on a scale where a significant fraction of women are trans-women
(2) People transitioning just so that they qualify for that sweet board seat
(3) Boards preferring trans-women
I already argued against (1). I would also argue that the average male manager is not going to change his legal gender identity to secure a board seat. (For one thing, being trans is likely to severely limit your relationship options.) And I also don't see boards preferring trans-women. If the board is an old boys club, it seems much more likely that they care about being able to make misogynistic jokes than that they care about the sex bits of the other board members. A trans woman is at least as much an outsider in these circles of men with their wives and mistresses as a cis-women. (This is the other reason why the manager bent on making his career is not going to transition: they might get the board position, but at the cost of a lot of conformity, which will likely limit their career further on.)
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Where does that happen? At what point in any trans person's life will they be through the transition process so well that they "pass", and also still sharing showers with sex-segregated people? I can only think of a couple, and they're either voluntary organizations that can make their own rules (like gyms) or places like prison where they don't have full civil rights anyway. What's the scenario here?
The sort of situation the underlies Oncale-style scenarios -- long on-site deployments in grungy conditions with little or restricted access to non-company facilities -- is rare, but does still exist. Some of those fields are historically male-dominated, like oil field work in Oncale's case, but whether that's -dominated in the sense of near-zero remainder or just a lean varies. Restroom access tends to be far more common and serious a problem (and there's reasons for Ally's Law, for a non-trans context), though.
Yes, it's possible to leave your job (and sometimes career), or to some limited extent just suffer through it (the trans woman coworker I've mentioned before did Have To Negotiate re: restrooms, but just ducked the hotel room and shower questions, sometimes at pretty significant costs), but that's 'voluntary organization' in only slightly more of a sense than public schools are 'voluntary' where home-schooling or moving is an option.
Moreover, the line between public-commanded and voluntary private organizations gets fuzzy, in the modern day. The government does, actually, put rules about the spacing of toilets and showers in your private member-only org. At best, this turns into a trans-equivalent of what the New York vampire rule was trying to do to gunnies; it might be theoretically possible to comply with the law and carry a firearm/use a gym shower as a post-op trans person matching your presentation, but in practice actually doing so, and even a business trying to work with you might not be capable of actually doing so in a way you could trust. More often, it invites restrictions on those private orgs that don't cooperate.
There's a fair criticism that the trans movement is a good part of why that's the case. I agree this would be a more compelling argument had activists spent the last ten years trying to win hearts and minds, rather than argue for Bostock maximalism-and-then-some or obfuscate even the most egregious abuses of their proposed alternative policies when the shave-my-balls guy starts trolling random beauty salons.
((Though in turn, there's a counterargument that this policies impact otherwise normal people, not just activists, and for every Andrea James there's a few dozen non-trans trans activists that are aggressive nutjobs.))
But regardless, it's worth keeping clear eyes on what the ramifications of a policy actually involve.
So your scenario is an oil field roughneck who transitions so well that he passes, but goes back to his job?
You got even one example of this, or are we purely hypothetical?
Oilfield specifically, no, Oncale's just the best-documented example of what people are worried about. There's some practical and procedural reasons trans women (or men, for that matter) are unlikely to work on oilfield or remote drilling platforms, and from a quick google search I haven't seen any examples.
Aviation, fire rescue, emergency medical services or elder care services? The exact dividing lines for examples gets complicated, especially since people have often wildly varying bars for passing (and for firefighters specially you're a lot more likely to see ftm, where 'post-op' is a lot more varied and... probably not something most straight guys are going to find more awkward), but people either transitioning while in the field or right before joining it aren't that unheard of.
Fortunately for society, but unfortunately for discussion on this matter, a lot contention gets solved through relatively low profile compromise, partly because people can be reasonable and partly because of the big exception in the ADA. So lawsuits tend to involve people either are very litigious who run into assholes (and note there the actual lawsuit targeted Cabela's, not the battery company where the shower situation actually would have mattered had Blatt stayed).
I maintain
1: Virtually no one passes in person, definitely not in a communal shower.
and
2: Any scenario in which this could theoretically be an issue is so vanishingly rare as to be not worth worrying about as a societal problem. This is trans angels on the head of a pin.
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From my understanding of the ruling, it bans trans women from single sex women spaces. So de jure, even a fully passing trans-woman is banned. Obviously, defying that ban would be a infraction which is hard to detect.
Is your argument that any use of a communal shower is voluntary, and that a trans-person can simply opt not to go to the swimming pool to avoid gender-segregated spaces? Just as she can stay at home to avoid using gender-segregated bathrooms?
I will grant you that from what I know, many trans women who did not have surgery will try their uttermost to avoid situations like communal showers, because unlike what J.K. Rowling is thinking, they do not really get off on the idea of showering with a bunch of random women who can see their dick. (I think the solution is to have some single-stall, unisex cabins and showers, btw.)
But to deny people who can pass while naked their preferred gender showers seems silly.
I am quite skeptical that anyone at all can pass while naked IRL, so the whole argument seems silly to me.
The intersection of an exceptional individual who must have spent an enormous effort to look like the opposite sex with a situation in which they are forced to use communal showers seems even less likely. Certainly nothing we need legislation for, it won't happen often.
I think you and I mean different things by "to pass".
For me in that context, it means that a stranger is subconsciously inserting you into their mental categories of "men" or "women". If I were to go into a communal shower and saw a person of average statue with no facial hair, developed breasts and no dick and balls, I would place them in the category "women" -- and wonder if I am in the wrong shower.
The other interpretation of "to pass" is more adversarial. Something like "a stranger whose prior on you being trans is 0.5 will categorize you either as a cis-woman or a trans-woman following a close-up inspection of your naked body".
I would argue that for the shower situation, to pass in the first sense is sufficient. The prior of someone being trans IRL is low. If you see a cock in the woman's shower, that is certainly enough evidence to overcome the prior of "random person in the woman's shower is typical XX". But if someone is trying to pass to the point where they had bottom surgery, in most cases I would expect the subconsciousness to just put them in the "women" category.
I don't know what goes on in women's showers, obviously, but "excuse me, but can you stand still for a minute while I inspect your labia to determine if you are one of us or one of these god-awful pervert men who likes to spy on and/or rape women, (and in your case might have cut off his genitals to better to better hide among us)" is not a level of scrutiny I would expect in practice a lot.
Serious question: have you known any trans people personally? I used to work with an FtM and not all the testosterone jabs and clipped hair in the world makes up for being 5 foot 4 max and having a voice like a flute. There’s also just the fact that the body shape is wrong, the movements are wrong. After only a few moments your brain is screaming at you, “This person is not what they say they are.” That’s why it’s so insulting and damaging to be forced to ignore the evidence of your own eyes.
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Nobody would need to do labia inspections because every woman in that shower would already know what this person's sex is - and they would know because even with the absence of a penis and testicles, the trans individual is still not 'passing'. The womens' subconscious is still tagging them as 'transwoman' or 'man'.
I've only ever seen 'passing' used in the sense of 'unable to notice the difference'. Dylan Mulvaney doesn't pass, even if we limit our focus to their top half and not even bother with genitals. Now, if you put him on a magazine cover, apply makeup, get the angles right, and have a professional photoshoot, then in that small instance they may pass. It will produce a still image that activists will smugly forward to your attention while saying "ppl saying Dylan doesnt pass should take another look" or "she looks more feminine than 90% of the women I know fr fr". Since I have to admit that yeah, they do look like an actual woman, I get tasty egg all over my face.
And then I say "Very interesting! Big pass! Now take their clothes off and see how well this illusion holds up. Actually, just put them in a real-world interaction where you could watch them move and listen to them talk. You will pick up on how non-passing they are well before anybody needs to take their pants off. Because this trick only works with a static JPG and a truckload of cosmetics that will wash off in the shower."
Many people seem to believe that transwomens' looks are largely indistinguishable from those of unattractive or 'unfortunate'-looking women, especially when the eyeliner, lip gloss, and powder are removed. But this has not been my experience - I can distinguish between ugly or odd women from the men dressing up and/or acting like a woman. I have a strong intuition that my subconscious is playing a role in noticing the differences, and it won't be fooled. My subconscious categorization of transwomen is still 'men', and I think the biological women in the shower have the same software as I.
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Sort of? Per my understanding it simply means that organisations cannot be prevented from excluding trans women via the equality act if that is their wish. Any org can still create a trans-women-and-women space if they like. This just allows for the creation of actual single sex spaces if they're desired.
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While I accept that there exist people for whom this is true (possibly even the majority), there have been enough high-profile cases the other direction (many such cases) that I don't think this statement is a good one around which to design policy.
I am fine with a policy of "no dicks (of people older than eight or whatever) in communal women's showers". (I would still very much prefer to add single stall showers for people who do not clearly pass as one or the other gender -- making a transwoman who is taking hormones and has tits shower with a bunch of guys also is not a good outcome.)
Broadly I'd agree with you, as a man who's never gotten used to nude communal spaces. I can change quickly at the gym if I have to, but I generally avoid communal showers anyway. But I know some cultures embrace it more generally (saunas and such).
Individual stalls are nice, but it's hard not to see that it's a more expensive option (more stalls, more fixtures, more maintenance). The West is probably rich enough to afford it many places, but it is using resources that could conceivably be used elsewhere, and I understand if some communities decide to do so.
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I agree with you by and large, but to play Devil's Advocate - are gender-segregated showers mandated if you're running a swimming pool in England? The ruling only seems to ban trans women from showers designated for "women"; not to say that women-exclusive showers must exist. Presumably swimming pools can choose to bill showers for "biological women + transfeminine individuals" if they like, and that wouldn't violate the new law. (Not that I think they're likely to do so.)
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Defining the word "woman" based on biological sex is just redundant and makes it harder to discuss things. We already have the words "female" and "male" to describe biological sex. If the government insists on giving special privileges to "women", then anyone should be able to identify as a "woman" if they want to. In fact, I think feminists use the word "woman" instead of "female" to somewhat soften their policy positions. Giving special quotas and handouts to females would be more blatantly discriminatory, since natal sex is an inherent characteristic. And saying that "males are trash" would be a lot more obviously hateful than "men are trash", since the word "man" refers more to an abstract social construct than something people are born with.
Feminists use the word "women" because "females" makes you sound like you've watched too many Star Trek episodes.
"Reverse-sexism is as much a contradiction in terms as reverse-racism."
Despite online feminist complaints the biggest users of "females" to describe women (well outside of scientific literature anyway) is the American Black community.
Keep this in mind when people complain about use of "female" and accuse nerdy white males of doing it.
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The words woman and man have always meant male and female adults. It's only in the past decade or so that trans-activists have tried to redefine them to be somehow unrelated to biology, for the sake of being able to force everyone to pretend that a man in a dress is actually a woman.
Things were easy to discuss before, transactivists made it harder by trying to forcibly uncouple the words man and woman from what they have always meant.
Well that's fine, but I'm talking about how things should be, not how they are. People should be allowed to choose their gender, because more freedom is better than less freedom. Having separate words for talking about biological sex and gender is useful.
No it isn't, because those aren't separate things to begin with. "Gender" is merely a synonym for "sex". And much like @Crowstep said, there was no confusion on this point until recent decades when activists have tried to redefine the words to point to an entirely new concept. But going by the old (and imo correct) definitions, it is incoherent to talk about "choosing your gender" because that is an objective fact about reality. Perhaps one day we will be able to effectively change someone's sex/gender, but we aren't there yet. So you don't get to choose at our current tech level.
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People should be allowed to walk through walls, because more freedom is better than less freedom.
But, alas.
Sometimes you just want to identify as the Kool-Aid Man.
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Yes, and we already do: Male/female and man/woman for sex, and masculine/feminine for gender. And people are already free to choose whether to be masculine or feminine. Sadly for those who would like it to be otherwise there are hard and inescapable limits on how far gender overlaps with sex such that no amount of changing one's gender will ever change one's sex.
If someone starts a Pretty Dresses And Nail Art Club then there's nothing stopping men from joining. If someone starts a Women In STEM scholarship grant it should be for women, not people in pretty dresses.
I admit to being a grinch-like person, but the fact that trans activism undermines things like scholarships for women is to me the biggest reason to support it.
Does it though? The women's scholarships still exist, and M2Fs are just as easily used as an argument that women continue to be disadvantaged by men than they are an argument that the scholarships should cease in the interests of equality.
Women vs men, whether for or against, is not helped in either direction by conflating women with men. "Women aren't disadvantaged, this man-in-a-dress has done every bit as well as men do without extra help", or, "Women, which includes men-in-dresses, need their own resources otherwise men will have them at a disadvantage". This is just an argument over who gets to wear dresses.
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For what use?
For a world with trans people in them, for one thing. There are a lot of social situations where you must refer to people without being able to look at their genitals or chromosomes. If you don't know if you should refer to that flat-chested, bearded person as a man or a woman, then then these words are have lost their everyday purpose.
Now, if your position is that we should get rid of these words (and gendered pronouns) in everyday use and just use them in medical or sexy contexts, that is consistent, but also not how humans work.
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Why?
It's trivial to identify examples of freedom that are not better the more people are free to exercise them. It's equally trivial to identify ways in which increasing certain types of freedoms in one respect creates direct or secondary tradeoffs in another. Therefore, 'more freedom is better than less freedom' is not a self-proving axiom, particularly on a single metric of comparison.
Are there some specific freedoms do you think that you currently have but wish you didn't have? Alternatively, are there some freedoms you have and exercise, but wish you lived in a society where you and everyone else could not exercise that freedom?
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Does that include the freedom to describe the world accurately, for example, by describing the Wachowski brothers as brothers?
Or the freedom for a woman to get undressed without a man watching?
The freedom for women to compete in sporting competitions amongst themselves without being outcompeted by physically superior men.
Transexuals were always allowed to describe themselves as the opposite sex, and to dress as the opposite sex if they wanted. It's the desire to force everyone else to play along that generated the pushback. There are genuine tradeoffs here, and if we're going to use 'more freedom' as the heuristic, surely we should weigh the freedom of the majority more than the freedom of a tiny, tiny minority?
Yes, that would be free speech.
I think we should try to arrange things so that everyone can have privacy when getting undressed. So yes, I agree with this as a special case of a general policy.
Well, people should be able to freely associate, meaning that if they want to hold a sports event for only biological females, that should be allowed. I don't think they should necessarily receive federal funding for events that discriminate based on sex, however. If the government is going to fund sports, I think everyone should have an equal chance to participate. Which obviously does not mean that everyone will have an equal chance at winning. Sports are not fair, and being female is just one of the many ways someone can be disadvantaged. Why should that be singled out?
Not always, there have been laws against crossdressing in many countries. The US has progressed past this, but some countries still haven't.
I view freedom as absolute, so there should be no weighing involved. I would only describe something as a freedom if everyone can have an absolute right to it. Everyone can have an absolute right to free speech, but it's not possible for everyone to have an absolute right to food or healthcare.
It sounds like you mostly disagree with the transactivist agenda, which makes me wonder why you have bothered to swallow their (obviously motivated) definitions of sex and gender. But it sounds like we mostly agree, except for a few things.
Because if we don't single it out, then female sports literally cannot exist. Women are worse than men at every sport (including things that aren't really sports like chess). The only exception I'm aware of is ultramarathon. Without female-segregated sports, women cannot practically play sports competitively. Whether or not there is federal funding (remember that other countries exist) seems kind of immaterial to this fundamental issue.
You can view or define freedom however you want, but the reality is that real life always involves compromises, tradeoffs and zero-sum situations. We need a way to adjudicate these. Given your own limited definition of freedom cannot apply to most of them, how should they be adjudicated?
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Only in the minds of a very specific cohort of predominantly white middle to upper-middle class progressives mostly located in particular urban enclaves in Western Europe and coastal North America. Nobody else ever bought into it. The aforementioned cohort is drastically over-represented among the media and loves telling itself that everyone agrees with it, but for the first time in living memory it really is going to be defeated on one of its pet social causes.
Well as a white middle class progressive living in coastal north America, I primarily care about how this issue affects that demographic. Lower class black regressive muslims living in the desert can define gender however they want, as long as it doesn't infringe on my rights. Then everyone can decide which culture they would rather live in, and everyone can be happy.
Oh please, the entire LGBT project is only kept alive by the Dems capturing working-class minority votes with other issues and then leveraging them toward a cause that minority base mostly finds sickening. Letting everyone just "decide" is the last thing you want.
That's why Trump's campaign attacks on the issue and electoral gains among minorites were so significant. The Democratic Party doesn't need to be utterly routed in order to be defeated here, merely forced to choose between drag parties on the White House lawn and maintaining its blue collar minority voting base. Given how quickly Newsom jumped ship on the trans sports thing, it's safe to say they're already feeling the pinch.
It may be the last thing that some people want, but it's kind of putting words in his mouth to say it's the last thing @LiberalRetvrn wants.
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Might want to consider how alienating half your friends and then starting a war with JK Rowling affects that demographic.
"The second coming of Gamergate—this time with more media support!" isn't actually a long-term sustainable (survivable?) position.
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Now if only you could find it in your heart to not infringe on the rights of non-progressives in your own country...
Well I believe that everyone should have absolute free speech and absolute bodily autonomy. What rights am I infringing on by wanting the government not to give people with certain chromosomes special privileges?
The right to tell the truth as you see it, and act accordingly. The Gender Recognition Act was, and various self-ID laws throughout the western world still are, forcing people to treat some males as if they were women.
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Then the purpose of this system of divorcing "female" and "woman"- what it does- is to launder this exact thing through "if you're willing to deny the truth in a way that suits our orthodoxy you too can have some of the gibs".
Note that the group most opposed to this, that being a particular subset of 'females', are generally opposed to the fact this allows males to assume privileges currently granted to females, but not generally opposed to those [blatantly discriminatory] privileges existing in the first place.
Women who are opposed to those privileges existing are generally understood as gender traitors, much like how a white person in 1950 opposed to institutional privilege would be considered a race traitor. Those who believe in gyno-supremacy usually consider these types a lost cause outside of the occasional think-piece about cheating being good for you.
Gynosupremacists (when they retreat to their motte they call themselves 'feminist') use these words interchangeably for a reason; when they say the latter, they mean the former, as a worldview founded on sexism predicts.
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Redundancy exists in language, it's called a synonym and there's nothing wrong with that. However, in this case you are wrong as there are differences between the words "female" and "woman". "Female" can refer to a specimen of any sexually dimorphic species of any age. "Woman" refers only to humans and only to adults.
You're not making sense, if anyone should be allowed to get special privileges, they are no longer special. You can argue, if you want, for abolishing all special privileges, but it's a marginal position in society that is rejected even by trans activists themselves.
No they don't. Everyone knows it's discriminatory, that's the entire point, and no one uses the words to refer to the social constructs.
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Step me through this, why are statistically significant amounts of rape the only valid reason for keeping trans women away from women's spaces? If trans women don't get raped in the men's bathrooms, can we just declare that they have no right to access women's batrooms?
Why are we limiting the analysis to perverts? If that was the only problem was perverts, we would have simply allowed all other men int women's spaces, or every space would be unisex.
Why?
Also, how common do you think this case even is?
The most disturbing thing about seeing a naked FTM with a dick, is that you get to see the frankensteinian nature of "gender affirming" surgeries in all their glory, not mistaking them for a cis man.
"When I am weaker than you I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles".
The GRA, before this ruling, was actively forcing anyone who wanted to implement traditional sex segregation to include "trans women" in the women's category.
Yes, a "I didn't expect the leopards to eat my face" moment for the TERFs. Doesn't change the fact that no one on the trans side has a problem with quotas for women, until they're taken away from trans women.
Well, rape is a very bad outcome, and this is why it is fielded as an argument by both the TERFs and the trans activists.
Of course, it is not the only argument -- we could likely prevent some rape in bathrooms through extended video surveillance, and yet nobody argues for that.
It has the added advantage of being somewhat quantifiable. If we instead judge purely on how uncomfortable it makes people to be oogled by someone who is attracted to them (divorced from how threatened it makes them -- that is related at least to the subjective perception of rape risk), we run into all kinds of problems related to quantifying that. Presumably, some men are uncomfortable being oogled by gay men (likely a reason why openly gay people were banned from the military), and likely some women would prefer not to undress in front of a lesbian. And some trans people will cause someone to be uncomfortable no matter where you put them.
I haven't really seen it used as an argument by TERFs to be honest.
Anyway, you haven't answered the other part of the question. If rape is the argument, and there isn't enough of it to keep trans women out of women's bathrooms, what is the evidence that trans women will be raped more in mens bathrooms?
Somehow we haven't seen a massive outcry about gays in mens bathrooms, or lesbians in women's bathrooms, so probably any discomfort created is much lower than the one caused by males in women's bathrooms.
The question is will it be less or more.
I do not have statistics, and I am also not sure if anyone who is not blatantly partisan has collected statistics.
Anecdotally, I think that there is a minority but significant fraction of men who assume that anyone with tits in a men's bathroom is looking for cock (and not just avoiding the queue in front of the women's bathroom). Some of these men will be willing to fuck anything which resembles a female with a pulse.
Well, I'd say whatever argument for preventing that from happening by not letting cis mes into the same room with trans women, applies to not letting trans women into the same room with cis women.
If the argument for forcing establishments, by law, to let trans women into women's bathrooms, is "well, where there really that many rapes?", that same argument should apply to just letting them go to the men's bathroom to begin with.
If you're just going to say "I don't trust either side's statistics on this", then we need a different argument entirely.
While I think that nobody deserves to get raped, I will also say that in most cultures, the behavior of a person does empirically affect their odds of being victimized. Ideally, a woman could walk naked through a biker bar without getting any unsolicited comments, but that is just not the world we are living in.
We do have strong norms against men going into the women's bathroom. We do not have strong norms against men sexualizing a person which is somewhat passing as female in the men's bathroom. Imagine a cis-he-said vs cis-she-said rape trial about some sex in a bathroom whose consent is in dispute. If it happened in the women's room, the prosecution is going to argue that the defendant is a sex pest who was intruding into women safe spaces to rape. If it happened in the men's room, then the defense is going to argue that the alleged victim clearly intruded into a space where she does not belong looking for sexual adventure. This might not decide the case -- clearly some men have consensual sex with women in the women's bathroom, and clearly some women get raped when they go into the men's bathroom just to avoid the queue, but without ironclad evidence either way, it will likely influence the jury's verdict.
Personally, I would give any m2f who is passing at more than about 50% probationary access to the women's bathroom, with the understanding that they are expected to be on their very best behavior. If you hit on people in there, flash them, masturbate in the stall, or try to look over or under the stall walls, you are out. (Incidentally, I think these are generally sane rules to enforce also for cis people in their respective bathrooms.)
Or one could tie m2f bathroom privileges to the testosterone level. Presumably, that hormone is correlated with the likelihood of someone raping, and someone on T blockers will be a lot less likely to rape than the median man. (On priors, I would expect that 80% of the men accused of rape would be in the top 50% of male T levels.)
At the end of the day, the other thing about bathroom segregation is enforcement. We probably don't want to declare any man who is in a women's bathroom a sex offender. Based on priors, the likeliest explanation is that a man who walks into a women's bathroom was just absent-minded or blackout drunk and got the wrong door, if we crucify all the men (and -- for fairness -- women in men's bathrooms) who do this this would make a massive dent in our population. So we can't get rid of the sex pests the moment we catch them in the wrong bathroom for the first time. Sure, there are certainly some sex pests who claim that they are trans and use that to annoy women in their bathroom (and we should not let them get away with that!), but I think that the median would-be rapist in a women's bathroom will not try that argue that they deserve to be there (which would entail waiting for the police, making the argument and leaving a paper trail), but simply say "oops, terribly sorry, I thought this was the men's room" and get lost.
But trans activists were arguing (and for quite a few years were very successful) for a significant exception to the norms against men going to the women's bathroom. The original interpretation of the GRA even made it illegal to refuse certain men access to the bathroom. You originally phrased your objection as one based on liberty and skepticism of solving the issue through law, and I find it odd you're glossing over this aspect now.
Maybe the pre-existing norms make it less likely for women to be raped by MTFs, then for MTFs to be raped by men, but the argument is completely speculative, while your original objection was:
So is this a practical concern for MTF GRC holders being raped by men, or is this a moral panic? I think you should answer the question the way it was asked, or concede that it was not a valid argument to begin with.
Personally, if they really feel unsafe in the men's bathroom, I'd say they can use the disabled ones. There's plenty of them, and new buildings are mandated to have them.
Sure. I think it's enough if women get to be able to scream "Eeeeek! A man!", and have the nearest security guard or concerned citizen kick the interloper out, and for establishments to be able to ban repeat offenders from their premises without exposing themselves to lawsuits.
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Indeed. I can't be happy about a slap fight between the women and the transwomen fighting over the spoils of an obviously discriminatory quota policy. The entire dispute reeks -- no board should ever impose a requirement based on sex or gender or any combination thereof in the first place.
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Links to:
(Am I the only person who finds it maddening that in the year 2025 newspapers still don't bother to link to the easily-findable publications that they base their reporting on?)
I think that's a fair criticism, but I think there are at least three strong points arguing against your interpretation, which are also mentioned in the judgment:
The Equality Act 2010 was meant to replace the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and Sex Discrimination Regulations 1999, which predate the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and obviously intended to use the biological definition. There is no evidence to suggest the lawmakers intended to change the definition of man and women.
The Gender Recognition Act creates a distinction between legal sex and biological sex; it does not abolish biological sex (how could it?). Interpreting the EA as referencing biological sex is not inconsistent with the GRA, especially since this is the most common interpretation. You could argue that if the EA wanted sex to be interpreted as legal sex, it should have defined this explicitly, and since it doesn't, it could be reasonably assumed to default to biological sex.
The EA only refers to “pregnant women” and never “pregnant men”. This implies the word "woman" refers to biological sex, because it would be unthinkable for a law to exclude biologically female legal men (trans men) from protection of discrimination on the basis of pregnancy.
I admit I'm biased because I oppose genderism in most of its forms, but I think the judgment is defensible.
This is especially egregious, and in my opinion actively harmful, when it comes to legal reporting. Holding aside for the moment my opinion of most legal reporters (it generally can be summarized as starting with "t" and ending with "oo fucking stupid to pour water from a boot if instructions were written on the heel") the average person struggles to access published court decisions. Federal decisions are squirreled away in PACER, a database that has not seen the light of a UI update since 1995, and state court decisions are usually buried deep in a PACER knockoff that is somehow worse than the original. Some states of course actually make it fairly easy to find decisions, but many do not. As if that were not annoying enough, legal reporting almost never actually names the goddamn case they are reporting on. Sure if you're reading AboveTheLaw or a site curated by an actual attorney it'll cite the case because our 1L legal writing professors beat the bluebook into our heads with a ball-peen hammer, but the New York Times? Washington Post? Any newspaper read by normies? Nada. Oh sure you can usually piece it together (Name1 v. Name2/Name v. State/State v. Name) but how is the actual NAME OF THE CASE YOU ARE REPORTING ON not included by default?
This is a bone I've had to pick for a while, but it really crystalized during the most recent round of reporting on the Tate brothers' civil suit in Florida. Trying to find an actual copy of the judge's motion ruling took me deep into the bowels of Florida's case search database (one of the aforementioned PACER knockoffs) and while I was able to find the original document eventually, it would have been so much easier if the journalists had just linked to the damn thing, or even written down the case citation somewhere in the body of their article.
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I straight up think it should be intensely shameful bordering on illegal for journalists to publish news articles about scientific studies or judgements without a link to the original.
We have hypertext, I don't have to be locked into reading only your loose poor quality recollection of events goddammit.
More infuriating is that sometimes the only thing that survives is the shitty article.
I suspect that half the time the journalist a) hasn't read the study, and b) is only rewording a press release from either the university or activist group associated with the study. You can tell by the way all articles on a study will use identical framing and share particular phrases that aren't quotes from the study itself. Frequently they all make the same odd mistake, like a typo, mislabeled figure, or metric conversion.
The big universities have entire offices dedicated to research publicity, and of course it's the entire goal of most non-profit "institutes."
From reading a lot about insulation and heat pumps I've developed a spider sense for "this entire news article was written by a Rocky Mountain Institute publicist"
Outside a handful of prestige outlets (and even then...) it's shocking to me just how many times my self-interested, comms department-approved talking points have shown up verbatim and uncredited in supposedly neutral news articles. Literally all you have to do is be the pithiest of the two or three people they bother emailing to ask for comment on a story, and they'll usually print whatever you tell them without the slightest effort to push back or verify. (And keep in mind, this is in a context where the journalists have no intrinsic interest in taking my employer's side. Imagine how easy this must be for prominent advertisers, favored politicians, etc.)
In my experience, journalists have exactly two settings: "libelously hostile" and "please just write my copy for me," depending on what their deadline looks like.
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I’ve mentioned it before but my former journalist friend (working for a major newspaper, but think BBC news site not the NYT) was required to write 8 articles a day. There just isn’t the time for more than
That might be true on average - i.e. space-padding articles that are forgotten they moment you're finished reading. I doubt that's how narrative-setting ones about hot CW issues are written.
Probably - my understanding is that the top NYT writers might get weeks, which is why I specified that he wasn’t one of those. I just think it’s an interesting fact that deserves to be more widely known.
Yeah when you write features you get a set amount of time you work out with your editor based on the estimate of the amount of time and work you'll have to put in. It can range from anywhere from 24 hours (usually a group project) to years (although that's more for when a publisher wants to hire a well respected author so they'll go to to their dinner party). When you write copy, you slam it out as fast as you can. Copy used to be a path to feature writing or correspondence, but nowadays it's just a molochian devourer.
Right, that’s why my friend got out of it. That, and the fact that editors tend to be so heavy-handed you can’t recognise what you wrote when they’re done with it.
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Yep this is it exactly on the journos behalf. Except change half to 90% - and that's being charitable. The publishers could change this but don't however, because they don't want people leaving their site for any reason ever. What if they don't come back!? They are often right to be afraid - after all why continue reading some moron's interpretation of a study when you can just read the study itself? Or why listen to a journo's memory of a politician's policies when you can check out their website and discover them for yourself?
And scientists don't really mind (as much as they complain about science journalism among themselves), because nothing gets citation numbers up like journo spam.
How would it being difficult to find their paper lead to more citations?
What?
Journalists excluding information that makes it easy to find your paper does little to help you get citations.
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The standard of precision you expect in 2 and 3 makes them seem like they are just grasping for straws.
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It drives me mad. I can only conclude that most newspapers don’t want people to easily be able to read the opinion so they can editorialize what it says. People having to Google the actual opinion requires probably enough effort to deter a non insignificant number of people. Choice architecture matters.
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I think I’d be marginally okay with a process that had significant time and effort to “transition”. I don’t think it reasonable to have an intact male declare on Tuesday that he feels like a woman and then get unrestricted free rein to enter any women’s spaces he likes — especially those where women would undress. But my fear is that the process once adopted will be made less strict over time — no need for surgery, then no need for hormones, then no need for medical diagnosis — until you end up with the thing the requirements were to prevent.
We can simply have a different bathroom for trans people (maybe a single stall). In India, it is required by law for all public places to have a different bathroom for the third gender.
This seems the sanest alternative. Sometimes technological solutions can fix social problems. (Just like the washing machine). Most trans-people who do not pass when naked will prefer single cabins, and a few shy or traumatized cis-genders might also prefer single cabins.
We have disabled loos already, which they can use in many places. More to the point, I suspect that a significant percentage of trans people are motivated precisely by the desire to be openly accepted as a member of the opposite sex, and will oppose this kind of segregation.
I think this percentage likely looks more than the actual percentage due to vocal activists. Probably, many transgender people will like being openly accepted as the opposite sex but they would still be ok with a compromise that has other areas for them.
I believe that you are almost definitely correct on this. Such a compromise most likely would be acceptable to the vast majority of people, including trans people. However, this would fail to mollify the vocal activists, and so it wouldn't solve the actual problem we have, of the vocal activists annoying the rest of us. In the long run, we can reduce the throughput of the pipeline that leads to people becoming vocal activists so that their population is small enough not to cause problems, but in the short run, we'll likely have to keep running into this problem.
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